Trini. Estella Portillo Trambley

      

      CONTEMPORARY CLASSICS BY WOMEN

       Allegra Maud Goldman

      Edith Konecky

       The Parish and the Hill

      Mary Doyle Curran

       This Child’s Gonna Live

      Sarah E. Wright

       Daddy Was a Number Runner

      Louise Meriwether

       Paper Fish

      Tina DeRosa

      Published by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York

      The Graduate Center

      365 Fifth Avenue

      New York, NY 10016

       www.feministpress.org

      Published in 2005 by the Feminist Press

      Originally published in 1986 by Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona

      © 1986 by Estela Portillo Trambley

      Foreword © 2005 by Helena María Viramontes

      Afterword © 2005 by Debra A. Castillo

      All rights reserved.

      No part of this book may be reproduced or used, stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Trambley, Estela Portillo, 1936-

      Trini / Estela Portillo Trambley; foreword by Helena María Viramontes; afterword by Debra A. Castillo.

      p. cm. — (Contemporary classics by women series)

      ISBN 978-1-9369-3209-2 (ebook)

      1. Mexican American women—Fiction. 2. Tarahumara Indians—Fiction. 3. Women immigrants—Fiction. 4. Women landowners—Fiction. 5. Illegal aliens—Fiction. 6. Indian women—Fiction. 7. Feminist fiction. Icsh I. Title. II. Series.

      PS3570.R3342T7 2005

      813’.54—dc22

      2004028533

      The Feminist Press gratefully acknowledges the contributions of the National Endowment for the Arts towards the publication of this book.

      Cover design by Dayna Navaro

      09 08 07 06 05 5 4 3 2 1

       Contents

Foreword

Prologue

1 El Bultito

2 Sabochi

3 Tonio and a Destiny

4 Goodbye, Wild Wind

5 The Goat

6 Gone!

7 Land of the Tarahumara

       8 San Domingo

       9 The Girl With No Name

       10 Revenge

       11 The Lamb and the Wolf

       12 The Blue Cottage

       13 Storm

       14 Moonstone

       15 Juárez

       16 Perla

       17 The Pilgrim

       18 Valverde

       19 Air of Farewell

       Author’s Note

       Afterword

       To Megan Anne Copeland

      God’s child,

       beautiful and brave

       Foreword

      Way back, it seems, in 1982, I had only known Estela Portillo Trambley through her first collection Rain of Scorpions (1975) when I invited her, along with Lorna Dee Cervantes, to do a reading I had organized for UC-Irvine’s Cross Cultural Center. She was already famous for her play The Day of the Swallows (1971) and for receiving the Quinto Sol Award for Literature (1972), in addition to her editorial role in El Grito’s first all-women issue (1973). I had never met her and while I waited in anticipation at John Wayne airport, I had seen nothing more than the photo on her book cover. Since I hadn’t been able to raise enough money for her honorarium, travel, and hotel, I was astonished that Portillo Trambley would accept my invitation to stay with my husband and me at our home in Orange County, California. I was beside myself with hospitality worry and pre-event jitters when Portillo Trambley got off the plane and approached me because I was holding her collection. I must have been quite a sight.

      I was a graduate student pursuing an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the time, the first Chicana to be admitted into the fiction concentration since the program’s inception. The campus itself was situated in Orange County, California—Bob Dornan and John Birch territory—enough said. Though the place proved to be extremely challenging to the soul, its one major saving grace at the